TIM FERRISS: “People have two unfortunate broad labels that they use which can be very misguiding. Namely, the differentiation between ‘journalist’ and ‘blogger.’ The reason I was successful in launching my first book with bloggers is this: I assumed that I should spend as much time on a blogger with a million-person readership as I would pitching an editor of a publication with a million person subscription-base.

“That’s a point that sometimes gets lost when people are considering pitching media outlets. They’ll spend more time pitching a national magazine that in reality only has a 100,000 person subscriber base (even though they have all these inflated bullshit numbers based on pass along in dentists’ offices.) They’ll spend an entire week agonizing over the email that they’re going to send to that editor. And then they’ll send a 3-sentence spam email to 100 bloggers of equal power as that editor: ‘Hey, I thought you’d really love the book. It’s perfect for your readers. Here’s an excerpt and here’s this and here’s that. Thanks for sharing with your audience.’

“It’s astonishing to me how standard this mistake is. If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it’s only a click away. The transition from interest to purchase is one click, whereas if someone sees something on Good Morning America, as wide as its reach may be, they need to write that down, and/or capture it in a device and then go online, search for it and purchase it. So the abandonment rate is so atrociously high. Many of the startups I advise have been on national television, and they barely registered any blip, if at all, on their Google analytics.

“But with a feature from some D-list blog, they’ll sell 100 times more. You are not after the biggest audience possible, you are after the right audience. That’s not a qualitative question, it’s also a quantitative question. You always want to hit the right thousand people.

“I always point people to the article ‘1,000 True Fans‘ by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You’re done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it’s unfortunate.

“People don’t trust entities. People trust people. Therefore, if someone reads, say, CNBC, they are reading a conglomerate of largely nameless contributors who are secondary to the content. When somebody reads Ramit Sethi’s blog, when someone reads Perez Hilton, when someone reads Ree Drummond, they are reading and trusting a single person as opposed to an entity. That personal level of trust is a very large responsibility, but it’s also a high-leverage point of influence. That is something that no amalgamation of a hundred or a thousand writers could ever match person-per-person.”

I asked Tim why he thought more people were not hip to this concept, and why everyone seems so focused on getting in general-interest national media over more focused, niche online media.

“I think there are a number of causes for this. The first is that it’s easier to pick out the national media targets than it is to pick out the high-value bloggers. If you walk into any bookstore, you can look at the newsstands and see which magazines are nationally-distributed, and you recognize certain names. Same with television. With the blogsphere, however, you actually have to dig, and know how to use multiple tools to figure out whom you should be speaking to.”

“Living in San Francisco. [Laughter] I mean honestly, it’s all about having a drink with someone and they say, ‘You should really check out this blog. You’ll frickin’ love it.’ And then I check it out. Lo and behold, I do love it. The blogs don’t have to be large at all. The audience has to be well-defined, and you have to match your message to that audience.”

I continued: “What tips besides living in San Francisco? What actionable advice do you have for people who want to take this approach, besides becoming friends with Tim Ferriss, which is harder to do now that your dance card is pretty much full. What actionable advice would you give people to follow this strategy?”

Tim told me: “I would say, #1: email is the most crowded channel for communicating with anyone. Telephone is usually an annoyance which leads to an in-person meeting. So if you are serious about developing relationships—not transactions, but relationships with people whom you can share ideas and cross-pollinate audiences with, meet them in-person. Spend the 300 bucks to fly to South-by-Southwest. Spend a week in San Francisco, spend a week in Nashville if music is your thing. Whatever the topic happens to be. If it’s fashion, go to New York City.

“If you are not willing to invest that time, you’re going to get a poor return on your investment. Life will be much less interesting on top of that. I look at those people who spend years and years publishing one book per year and who never quite get to where they want to get—I’ve given people my exact blueprint for pitching bloggers, yet, they still spam the shit out of hundreds of bloggers randomly with template emails.

“The bloggers who actually have dedicated audiences are getting pitched a thousand times more than you think they are. If you think that you are just going to waltz in and they’re starving for content with an audience of 200,000 people, you’re wrong. You’re probably late to the party so don’t walk into their living room and f***in’ kick off your shoes and put your stinky feet on table and yell at their significant other to go grab you a cold beer, because it’s poor etiquette.”

Tim himself has been quite open about how this relationship-building over time (rather than spammy pitching) is how he got his start. In fact, he was a beneficiary of the “effect” I’ve named after him, which in this case should be called the “Robert Scoble Effect”.

Robert is another person who can create these kind of effects for people/products/services he endorses, far beyond what national media (with a much larger audience) could do. Tim credits a great deal of his early success to this short post by Scoble.

How did Tim build a relationship with Scoble? By sending him a cold pitch?

“I met him after meeting his wife at CES in Vegas. More accurately, I never made it to CES. Instead, I went to the nearby Seagate-sponsored lounge called the ‘BlogHaus’ and simply had drinks with bloggers for two days. Robert’s wife, Maryam, was checking people in, and we hit it off. When interacting with everyone else, mostly bloggers, I asked a lot of questions about their craft and never pitched them the book. Only if they asked about me would I mention working on a book. Only if they pushed further would I even go into the topic. Then I would offer, if they were interested, an early copy with 15 pages or so selected specifically based on their interests, making it clear that ‘I don’t think you’ll like the whole book, and I certainly don’t expect you to do anything promotional, but I do think you’d enjoy the 15 pages I have in mind.”

Since my own book launched, I’ve had the opportunity to see examples of the Tim Ferriss Effect play out in other contexts beyond Tim or my book.

Another figure who exercises thought leadership with a large, loyal, concentrated audience, and who has the power to create massive successes if he thinks that audience needs to hear about something, is Brendon Burchard, founder of Experts Academy.

When Brendon told me that one of his favorite authors was Paulo Coelho, I decided to nominate myself for the chutzpah award of the century, and contact Paulo (a man who has sold roughly 140 million more books in his writing career than I have) and ask him if I might offer him an unsolicited marketing suggestion for the launch of his (then) upcoming book, Aleph. “You need to let Brendon expose you to his audience,” I wrote to Paulo, explaining who Brendon was and what his track record was. Coelho wrote back and said he’d be delighted, I connected the two via email, and this is what resulted, a live public call between the two of them.

My understanding is that tens of thousands of people registered for this call. That is tiny compared to the circulation of a major newspaper or the viewership of a primetime TV show.

But here’s the difference: Brendon’s audience (like Tim’s) is passionate, concentrated, and loyal. So when he told them they needed to check out Paulo’s new book, thousands of them did—all at once. When thousands of people buy a book at once, that get’s you to #1 territory on Amazon very fast. Here is what happened for Paulo within hours after the interview:

Paulo Coelho, one of the most successful authors of all time, has taken notice of this sea-change in book promotion. He told me: “I am trying to tell my publishers world wide that I don’t need to give interviews in major media to sell books. This is a big shift for them, but they are coming to my point of view. I decided to give no major media interviews with Aleph’s launching, and the results were astonishing: the book made the bestseller lists all over the world, except UK. Intuitively, I was investing a lot of time in my blog, and I can reach peaks of over 200k viewers per day.

“Now I am starting to record weekly podcasts on writing books. I just posted the first one, talking about Aleph, and we are over 48.000 in YouTube (less than 3 days). It had no editing, it was a test, but it worked beyond my expectations.”

Brendon told me: “It’s all about the depth of the relationship with the audience. Traditional outlets don’t have influence, they have impressions. What makes the individual blogger or newsletter owner so powerful is that (a) people subscribed to hear from them, (b) they’ve added real value to their audiences over the long-term, (c) they have a strong point of view and their biases are clear and transparent, and (d) they’re making direct calls to action for people to click a link or purchase something.

“I think we proved this with Paulo’s campaign for Aleph. When the front C-Section article on Paulo came out in the New York Times, in both print and on the web, it never even broke Aleph into the top 100 on Amazon. Our campaign and interview took Aleph to #1 on Amazon that week and #6 on the New York Times the following, with a clear majority of sales for that (tracked through Bookscan) coming as a direct result of our interview. That worked because people have loved Paulo’s previous work and posts, and because I have a very loyal audience.

“But there was one more thing we did. A key reason we could take Aleph to #1 is that we captured reader’s contact information. They gave us their name and email to get access to the interview, which allowed us to intelligently add value to them and then mobilize them to take action later on. This was critical. Mainstream outlets never do this.

“Getting all the traffic and attention from bloggers is critical, but authors who do not capitalize on the attention to capture leads, add value, and make sales will continue to be frustrated. I’m always making the comment that, from a marketing perspective, one of the worst things that could happen is that you get on Oprah, but you don’t have a website and campaign sequence up that can capture and convert all that interest.

“Same thing for getting on blogs—they might drive some initial sales, but to keep it all going an author needs to have in mind the bigger picture of their brand and business, they need to keep capturing and adding value to their audiences, and they need to be in it for the long haul.

“Authors and bloggers are storytellers. They have the same language and make their living by sharing perspectives and stories, which is why their audience match better. If an author hopes to win in today’s world, be a great storyteller, find other great storytellers.”

As I’ve been saying all along, it’s all about developing relationships. That’s where it’s at. Learn to become a great networker (here and here are my Forbes articles on how to do so), identify the people who can create “Ferriss Effects” in your field, and build relationships with them over a long period of time. The results may astound you.

***

Michael Ellsberg is the author of The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late (Penguin/Portfolio). Ellsberg spent two years interviewing some of the world’s most successful people who don’t have college degrees, and who instead majored in “street smarts,” to find out their secrets for real-world success and share them. Michael sends manifestos, recommendations, tips, and other exclusive content to his private email list, which you can join at www.ellsberg.com. Connect with him on Twitter @MichaelEllsberg or subscribe to his public updates on Facebook.

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In a word, wow. This post really resonates with me, as I have gone the traditional PR route for my fourth book. Yes, I’ve done posts on HuffPo, been written up in Forbes, and have some other high-profile stuff in the hopper. Yet, none of these channels has moved books.

Michael: Great article and some excellent tips. I like your point about how touching a large but relatively smaller group of passionate people is better than reaching a larger group of dispassionate ones. However, I don’t think that is the ONLY (or perhaps even the MAIN reason) why you had much greater success with the exposure given to you by Tim vs that offered by the mass media.

There is also an ‘immediacy’ and ‘convenience’ effect that is so powerful with web exposure. Think about it. It is so much easier for someone to go to Amazon to purchase your book when they read about it in a blog or forum (after all, it is just a click away) than it is when they are exposed to it via a TV or magazine. As a professional marketer, I learned a long time ago that the key to success is to make it fast and easy for someone to buy your product once they become aware of it. Food for thought!

“If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it’s only a click away. The transition from interest to purchase is one click, whereas if someone sees something on Good Morning America, as wide as its reach may be, they need to write that down, and/or capture it in a device and then go online, search for it and purchase it.”

This is the most interesting book marketing piece I’ve ever seen. Having read Tim Ferris’s books and being astounded at the passion of his audience, I am convinced that you are right. Ferris’s thinking and writing is counter-culture, somewhat “radical” in concept and very enticing in its message. You inspire. Think I’ll write a book and see if your suggestions work!

I was about to start wondering why you don’t mention what seems to be the obvious, but then Tim Ferriss mentions it: the fact that a (passionate) blog reader is just a click away from the product while the TV viewers will have forgotten about your product by the time the show they are watching is over.

Tim is an inspiration, to many, and in my opinion the greatest currently living (self) marketing mastermind.

On a side not: for all 4 Hour Workweek fans, visit http://4hwwsuccess.com for inspiring 4 Hour Workweek Success Stories.

Great article. I don’t have the book yet but I’ve caught some of your content have enjoyed and connected/related with it a lot. This article really highlights how the internet has changed everything forever. i.e. Everyone has the opportunity to put up a blog and build a community of loyal followers that was only previously possible with amazing amounts of traditional media exposure. That’s not to say its easy but the opportunity is there for everyone with a computer and an internet connection. Getting past the gatekeepers of TV is no longer necessary.

I’ve read these recommendations before and heard them from a number of places, but this is the most concrete demonstration of it. Thanks for your specific, personal details, Michael – that made all the difference between me reading this again, and finally getting it.

This is exactly what SOPA is for. To get people back to the mainstream network giants that send the same content out to everyone regardless of interests. Blogs and Google work too well in terms of promotion. Mickey Mouse doesn’t get paid this way. And Micky Mouse is very angry when he doesn’t get paid.

This is all nice and good but let’s face it, the very title of your post “The Tim Ferriss Effect” indicates that is was the direct intervention of someone with star power to tapping into their followers that lead to you’re books success. How many others out there have access to Tim Ferriss? Not much I’d imagine and like you yourself pointed out, unless you were his friend, the majority of unknowns out there would probably be rejected. This “advice” is a fluff piece for the rich and well connected and does nothing to truly advise the common man and first time authors.

Loved, loved, loved! this article! It was forwarded to me by a friend whom, as we both are, are trying to market our businesses and books and everything you write about in this article is 100% true and accurate.

One a side funny note, I completely agree about the Amazon ranking. I do the daily check on the rank for my book as well. One friend asked me what do I consider to be a good ranking…my answer … if it was better than yesterday!

With that said, building relationships within in your industry is key and your article points that out very well. I have been on NBC, ABC, Bloomberg, MSN Money and while I have received excellent traffic from all of those sources, none have outdone a couple of blogs related to my business. While I can’t say I have sold millions of books or millions of products my business sells, I have done well, when those bloggers, that have a passionate following, take the time to talk about me, who I am and what I sell, and do so on a personal level.

This is such a great article. I am a good example of how well this works. About a year before my book came out, I met bestselling author, J.A. Jance. I sent her a quick email afterward to thank her, and tell her I’d taken her advice. Then when I got a book deal, I wrote again to tell her that her advice had lead to a book contract and she reciprocated with more good advice. For me, it was all about thankfulness.

Through email we wrote back and forth and she gave me advice along the road to publication. I am a debut author and had no idea what I was doing. My memoir came out on 11/1/11 and she read it! Well, she sent an email to her entire email list about my book, something she’d never done before. She believed in, Breaking the Code, and became a champion for it. My sales numbers went up and continue to go up. I recently learned that she uses me as an example in her author presentations, which explains my constant surges in sales. She tells people to buy my book. My Amazon ranking went up and we are often paired together as items bought together. This has nothing to do with how much money you have or whether you have the right connections. It’s about being grateful and recognizing when someone has done something positive for you (advice, in this case). And by the way, a blurb written by J.A. will appear on the back of the 2nd edition of my book!

Additionally, I began cultivating online relationships when I first started writing my memoir almost 10 years ago. Those connections continue to spread the word about my book, in more ways than I can count.

I love this article. It put words and an explanation to what I “just happened” to experience along the way. Thank you for writing it! I guess as it turns out, what just felt right/good to do as a human being, ended up being the right thing to do for book marketing. Couldn’t get better than that! ~Karen Fisher-Alaniz

This is an eye-opening and inspiring message! Thank you, Mr. Ellsberg! I’m an indie writer about to release my debut novel and one of my biggest hurdles is trying to figure out how to market my work to the right audience. You’ve given me A LOT to think about, and you’ve just gained a fan. I look forward to reading many more of your insightful posts!

This is SO helpful. My book on chills and thrills in tribal Thailand will be out this fall, and I’d like to have it mentioned by Benny Hinn and Joyce Meyer. I”ve seen both of them in Thailand and I know they believe God is alive and interfacing with people. I haven’t known how to go about establishing contact. Now I know how to begin a relationship with them. Thanks, Michael Ellsberg. You’re awesome!

Underlying this article is a tacit assumption; that it is largely the author who has the onus of ensuring the success of his book. Book Publishers are no longer adding much value either from their physical distribution, or from the imputed reputation of their brand and imprint. So once their marketing efforts (like book tours and television appearances) start to wane against the built-in audiences of the authors–well then that is the beginning of the end for the book publishing industry (and self publishing will dominate). As goes the book business, so will the article/magazine industry — we have entered the era of author driven distribution (which is at the heart of what Forbes is calling entrepreneurial journalism.)

Brilliant article on the Tim Ferriss Effect Michael. As a speaker, author and consultant teaching women the power of digital marketing and digital self publishing, I found this article to be right on the money.

Outside of Amazon’s Lending Library [where I had 12,000 downloads in 3 days] the biggest mover of my book Your Millionaire Attitude was blog interviews and personal reviews from women with my direct target market that I had a personal relationship with.

Being mentored by Brendon Burchard I have used many of his marketing strategies also. When it comes to book marketing I would have to say Tim Ferriss and Brendon Burchard are second to none. Thank you for sharing this insightful blogpost. Cheers Pam Brossman, CEO SheExperts.com